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as we saw tht MS has come with a registry fix which gets off once the machine comes out of the standby mode.... SO y cant we use hibernate it will just consume some more hard drive space :)

Hibernation vs Standby Mode are very similar and people tend to confuse the differences. Standby basically turns off power consuming components like the hard disks and monitor. It switches the computer to a low power state. Its much like a warm boot. Any contents of memory and unsaved desktop settings are lost. Hibernation saves state information by writing a hibernation file which contains the contents of memory and is thus the same size as total RAM. This is a snapshot of active memory. When you turn your PC back on, the state, including which applications are running (desktop) and the memory contents are restored to RAM and voila! - you are back to where you were when Hibernation mode started. The restoration of state can take place in 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5 days, 5 weeks, ....
Hibernation is only available if your system is ACPI-compatible. If it is not, the Hibernation tab will be missing and you will have an APM tab instead. To enable Hibernation mode as one of your Shutdown options:
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Can anyone tell me why both systems with EXACTLY the same configuration AND drivers behave differently in terms of USB 2.0 power drain problem??

If Anandtech is right about the fact that since Asus W5A/W5F has integrated USB 2.0 camera, connecting a external USB 2.0 device shouldn't affect battery life since it already has USB 2.0 device via camera installed.

However, it does not. While Anandtech's results are consistent with THEIR own conclusions that disabling the device doesn't remove the problem, the only way is to physically remove it, it doesn't show for Tomshardware results.

Summarizing the differences:
Tomshardware1. With no external devices connected, Core Duo laptop has SIGNIFICANT battery life advantage over Pentium M
2. Core Duo laptop loses significant battery life when external USB 2.0 device is connected
3. Battery life AFTER the LOSS is STILL pretty much equal to Pentium M laptop
4. Pentium M laptop loses very insignificant amount of battery life with USB 2.0 device connected
5. Core Duo laptop AFTER THE PATCH GAINS significant battery life close to the result with no external devices connected, now the difference between CONNECTED and UNCONNECTED is within expectations
6. Pentium M laptop ALSO gains battery life after the patch, but much less significant then Core Duo laptop

Anand??? Tom??? Who the hell is wrong here?? Will you two sites stop bashing each other who has more "professional" journalism and cooperate, see what's wrong?? So umm, MAYBE WE KNOW WHY THERE IS A DIFFERENCE??!! Reply

Don't know who is right and who is wrong but at least THG is more consistent. Anand's conclusions are contradictary. Ex: 2 and 5. If the CoreDuo loses insignificant when USB2 is connected, how can it gain significant after the patch. Same contradiction between 4 and 6

And what about how swap cd/dvd bays alot of IBM's dell's has (also my d600) a removable internal cd writer in the task bar is si seems to be an usb device added to the system which I can "safelym remove" etc. so will it also affects battery life? quite confused now? Reply

A similiar thing happens to the Dell Axim x50v with WM 2005, a battery drain takes place, due to a "file manager"(?) that keeps running. Saw it posted on www.aximsite.com a while back. Going by memory here which is not the best this AM. Reply

Mark Twain had a saying, pardon my paraphrase, that a lie makes it halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

THG has zero credibility. Their smug little article is still up and my bet is will stay up uncorrected so all the AMD fanboys can chortle about mighty Intel stumbling.

Turns out, THG tried a little too hard this time. So they found 'dirt'; turns out the same phenomenon afflicts all Sonoma product, too.

Before you know it, the story will have morphed into: plug any USB into a core duo and it drains the battery instantly. Heck, I was just at a retail store last weekend and was warned by a "salesman" that Duos have a battery drain problem. I asked him if he reads Tom's Hardware a lot - he wasn't ready for that. Or for that fact that I said it is a USB implementation, really nothing to do with the Centrino product. But the next 50 customers will get the same 1/2 truth. And all 1/2 truths are is lies. Reply

I just read their new article and apparently they were tipped off by some "insider" about the problem and then went ahead and "discovered" and published it. That is what it says at the end of their article, anyway. Their forum thread that is linked has some comments from an editor or someone that are also interesting. I'm sure everyone is checking it out but for those that haven't you should for the sheer humor of it. Reply

Just now I observed on nx6125 that the moment Intellimouse Explorer for Bluetooth goes into power save mode (after ~1 minute of inactivity) Turion goes from 96% in C1 to 96% in C2.
Strange as it may seem nothing like this happens on Sonoma platform. I sense ATI SB400 does have something say about it.

Another thing is that the moment CPU starts using C2 intensively, the idle power consumption goes from ~15.6W to 13.2W which is pretty serious amount of power wasted.

Anand, I suggest you do not waste your time by testing battery life when you revisit this issue, to prove assumptions you may use Perfmon's Battery Drain counter.

HMM, funny is, the nc6220 does not show the battery counter present in Perfmon.
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Hello, I tested perfmon after reading your test. I own an Acer Aspire 5024 with a Turion 64 ML34 inside. So, I was wondering if this could cause me any battery problem. After testing Perfmon with % C3 time with USB wireless mini mouse, I can see a graph with mountains (between 60 and 100%) while the USB mouse is not plugged in and completely flat (0%) while plugged in. So, this may be the result of the problem you described? No?

I didn't test the battery life with the USB mouse plugged in and without it 'cause I can't find any utility to test that. So, I can't say if it affects the battery life. Reply

quote:Hello, I tested perfmon after reading your test. I own an Acer Aspire 5024 with a Turion 64 ML34 inside. So, I was wondering if this could cause me any battery problem. After testing Perfmon with % C3 time with USB wireless mini mouse, I can see a graph with mountains (between 60 and 100%) while the USB mouse is not plugged in and completely flat (0%) while plugged in. So, this may be the result of the problem you described? No?

According to AT, it means Turion systems also have the same problem as the Centrinos in terms of battery life reduction when USB 2.0 devices are connected. Since % mean HOW OFTEN THE CPU IS IN LOW POWER C-STATE, 0% means its not going into low power states AT ALL, while 60-100% means its going into low power state 60-100% of the time.
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I am awaiting my new Dell Inspiron E1705 (2ghz Duo, 2GB 667mhz, 80GB SATA 7200, Ultrasharp 1920x1200, 7800GTX Go) I hope this issue has a better fix because it seemed the fix didnt work will with this system. I think the USB hub that is built into the system may be the cause of this, hopefully Anand can get the review of this system and see if he can fix. Personal request if anyone reads this, apply new artic silver on the cpu/gpu then see how much cooler it runs, and how much more you can overclock the gpu...pretty please... Reply

quote:I am awaiting my new Dell Inspiron E1705 (2ghz Duo, 2GB 667mhz, 80GB SATA 7200, Ultrasharp 1920x1200, 7800GTX Go) I hope this issue has a better fix because it seemed the fix didnt work will with this system. I think the USB hub that is built into the system may be the cause of this, hopefully Anand can get the review of this system and see if he can fix.Q]

If it has USB 2.0 devices installed inside somewhere, you should gain from the fix. Since it doesn't and Anand isn't specifying what are the methods used to measure battery life, like whether he tested the system with default manufacturer settings or modified it so every system is equal.

If Anand is using default manufacturer power management(whether software or hardware through BIOS), it may mean Dell put the system to be not going to low power C-state in order to improve performance.

Wow.. so maybe this explains why my battery life is so different now than when my computer was new - I swear, when I first looked at it, it was saying 7 hours and I got like 5 when doing normal activities. With my mouse, though, it's more like 3-4... of course, it's a year older also. (P-M 1.7 Dothan)

How can you tell whether or not a device is USB 2.0? I'm sure something in the device manager says, but I can't tell.. Reply

Why is it that the two Asus systems that are the same, except for motherboard and a slight difference in memory speed, showed that the Sonoma platform had better battery life than the Napa platform? I know it isn't much difference, but shouldn't the Napa be noticably ahead of Sonoma?

Does the memory difference make that much of an impact? Or are the power consumption improvements in Napa pretty much only for when the processor is basically completely idle? If so then I don't think many people will see the extended battery life. Unless you like to leave your computer idle when it is running on battery. Maybe the improvements are also on the upper end and it is just the middle ground that didn't get improved. How high is CPU utilization in this test? Reply

quote:Why is it that the two Asus systems that are the same, except for motherboard and a slight difference in memory speed, showed that the Sonoma platform had better battery life than the Napa platform? I know it isn't much difference, but shouldn't the Napa be noticably ahead of Sonoma?

Does the memory difference make that much of an impact? Or are the power consumption improvements in Napa pretty much only for when the processor is basically completely idle? If so then I don't think many people will see the extended battery life. Unless you like to leave your computer idle when it is running on battery. Maybe the improvements are also on the upper end and it is just the middle ground that didn't get improved. How high is CPU utilization in this test?

Well the difference is within margin of error. While W5F based on Core Duo gains less than W5A based on Pentium M, the difference is very little, less than 15 min.

Lenovo shows better results. T60 based on Core Duo always gets slightly better than T43 based on Pentium M, whether before or after, and T60 can support higher resolution, otherwise identical components. Reply

Actually, if you take into account the larger capacity battery on the T60, 56WHr compared 51 WHr, the T43 comes out ahead most of the time. The T60 has a 9.8% larger capacity battery, but with the fix it only comes out ahead 3.2%, 1.85%, 8.24% and 5.04%. Reply

I'm looking into this issue myself and I will have an updated Core Duo performance article in the coming weeks that will address this as well as many other items. I wouldn't use the ASUS notebooks to compare Napa to Sonoma, especially given the internal USB 2.0 camera. I am hoping to do a Lenovo based Napa vs. Sonoma comparison that will hopefully make things a lot clearer.

I think that Napa allows a lower power setting, but you have to remember that two cores are still going to use more power than a single core when active. It might be interesting to see a test comparing Sonoma and Napa with the same CPU, as Dothan and Yonah both fix socket 479. There's also a question of the other peripherals, though: NIC, sound, screen, etc. all draw power. The newer Napa laptop from ASUS might have a better (re: brighter but more power hungry) LCD, for example, or a different HDD model. I don't know if they're strictly "identical" in other components, but a change of platform often involves other tweaks as well. Reply

quote:Id be more apt to say that the increase of the FSB and the second additional core are more likely the cause, because I think they did make sure the Asus laptops were exactly the same.

Keep in mind that with laptops especially with power consumption there is so many variations to battery life problem. It could be that the implementation of the BIOS or voltage regulator is different across the two. Voltage regulator is said to be 5-10% of total power consumption, so differences in V-reg can make differences you are seeing.

In reguards to AMD systems, I have a Turion on hand from Fujitsu (Lifebook S2000) and have been unable to duplicate the power loss from a default state with either a USB 2.0 external DVD drive, or a USB 2.0 Plextore ConvertX device.

I was also surprised to see that Anandtech didn't test any Turion systems themsevles in the article. But, having tested 2 Centrino systems of my own (one from Sager, the other from Dell), in addition to the Fujitsu, yes, it is time consuming. Reply

It's not a refusal to test, we're simply not sent any for review :) My next article will be a look at Core Duo vs. Turion performance on the desktop, but I'm still working on securing notebook review units. I would like to see if this issue does impact AMD systems as well, and to what degree.

After the Core Duo vs. Turion piece, if we still haven't gotten a Turion notebook in house I'll just buy one for this comparison.

It must have been difficult to mention and actually link to Tom's, I'm glad to see professionalism still lives.

Very nice job on the article, it looks as though you guys went the extra mile and actually did the work to try figure out what was going on. I read the Tom's article a couple of weeks ago and although they uncovered an important issue they seemed to think they could try to get to the bottom of it with phone calls rather than getting their hands dirty and taking the time to test things themselves. Reply

While the technical aspects of this article are intriging, I think there is too much editorial opinion added on top of that.

I think the main reason they post the link to Toms is to dispute the claim Tom's supposedly made that this was a Core Duo issue. That is not what the original article stated, though several times in this article there are thinly veiled allusions to that supposed claim.

I think that tech sites should spend a little more time focusing on themselves and the products they review, and a little less trying to show how they are better than the rest. That goes for all sites. You work speaks for itself. Reply

The reason for linking the THG article was to avoid taking credit for a discovery that I did not make. They were the first to stumble upon the issue and it was their article that inspired a deeper investigation, which eventually resulted in this article.

The point of this article wasn't to show how we were somehow better, but to address the mischaracterization of the problem. The THG results show a tremendous penalty on their Core Duo notebook due to the issue but a relatively small penalty on their Sonoma platform; this article was designed to explain why that was and hopefully clear up the very common misconception that this is predominantly a Core Duo problem.

The problem is that lots of people linked to that first article, and a very large number of those links incorrectly referred to the problem as a Core Duo issue based on the results that were originally presented. In reality, this problem appears to be nothing more than a Microsoft issue that impacts both Core Duo and Pentium M systems (I'm trying to figure out if it impacts Turion systems as well) but it was grossly mischaracterized in its public acception. I don't really care whose fault that is (personally I believe it's the fault of those who linked to the original article without thoroughly reading it), but I do care that the right information gets out there, which is what this article was designed to do.

I learned long ago that the best you can do is to put your best foot forward and let the reader decide on their own how they feel about you. I'm not trying to shape anyone's view of another site through my work, I'm just trying to get the most accurate information out there.

Be nice guys, if it weren't for the original THG article it would've taken much longer for this investigation to even happen. I just wanted to make sure that the bug was properly characertized and even more importantly, I want to actually see a fully functional fix from Microsoft that works even out of standby.

I will have to do some testing on my notebook with the 'workaround' fix installed. I could have sworn that around the time I installed SP2 on my lappy the battery life suffered, but this was about 6-12 months after I got it so I just figured the battery was getting old. Reply

Wow, this is getting interesting. I'm surprised that this bug affects 915 based systems too. I wonder if this could be a broader issue that may affect intel 855 systems or AMD-based computers with chipsets from other vendors. I suppose I could do some playing around Reply

I booted into Windows normal mode as cleanly as possible and ran Perfmon. The CPU was usually in C2 ~60% of the time and C3 ~35% of the time, for a total of ~95% in C2 or C3. Upon plugging in any of my USB stuff (an external hard disk, a Sandisk Cruzer mini, or even my IBM mouse), I'd get 95% in C2 and 0% in C3. Maybe my mouse is a USB 2.0 mouse; not sure.

Battery draw goes from about 11.7W to 12.5W when I plug in my mouse.

By adding the registry key, I no longer have the issue with the Cruzer or my external hard disk, but the problem with the mouse remains.

quote:Adding to what Jason said, you only need the 'secret' plugin for Core Duo processors. The C3 state counter that Perfmon already has works fine on older platforms.

Not just Core Duo, but: "As you can probably guess, Perfmon is inaccurate in this case. While Perfmon does a fine job of monitoring C3 states for older processors, it fails to handle properly the CPUs we're most interested in: the Pentium M and Core Duo." Reply